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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

With Matrix there is also a lack of good lightweight clients and servers. The official client uses Electron. It will never be an alternative to the IRC with this attitude. There is a Weechat plugin but it's in Python...

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There's a trend of "new, revolutionary Internet protocols" having reference (and, chronically, sole actually-useful, but with other ones always at various uselessly-incomplete stages of development so they can point to those and say "see, we're catching on!") implementations in languages that integrate like shit, crippling their adoption, rather than writing, say, a C library. IPFS is another one (and I like Go).

I setup a server a few months ago to get familiar with matrix. It wasn’t very lightweight either. I have since shut it down because I felt it was too resource intensive for the small amount of users that were using it.

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I think it's the other way around - bridge your slack/discord/whatever into matrix, and then bridge the matrix results into IRC channels. That way everything stays put in your IRC client and you don't have to have a webpage open just to chat.

The weechat plugin is being rewritten in Rust right now.

https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs

My hope is that bc it's an open protocol that it'll be simple to create local bridges to services and then hook those into an irc client. I agree with the parent that Discord and Slack are absolute messes and all I want is text on a screen with hyperlinks for chat.

To that end, I tried to set a personal server up on a local box that I have running, but it didn't take. I'm surprised there aren't any good tutorials sitting around to create a local instance/bridge.

weechat-matrix seems to be the lightweight client of choice.

weechat-matrix unfortunately cannot coexist with wee-slack if running on top of Python 3.9 (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/812, https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/issues/248), so one has to choose between Slack and Matrix. It's just a bug that will eventually get fixed, but it does make things unnecessarily complicated right now.

With this issue and Matrix being several times slower than any other instant messenger I've ever seen, I'd really prefer communities didn't move to Matrix. :-/

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